Where the Heart Is

The inventions of WWW and Internet are products of brilliant minds. They are tools that people now are enjoying on getting the world’s information about anything and everything that matters to them. With these inventions, companies of web and Internet experts populate the virtual world with best guidelines for Net safety.

SEO - Photo Credits Pixabay

Now these inventions have become the second home of bloggers, other type of online writers: novelists, book writers, newspaper journalists, businessmen, other individuals and etc. And the search engine optimization experts have worked together for the best tips and advice they can offer to Internet users such as:

Don't host your site with a host that allows spammers

This means any type of spammers, especially search engine spammers. If you don't know what your host's policy is towards spammers, find out. There should be something in their terms and conditions about malicious activity. If your IP is blacklisted, you'll be blacklisted right along with it, even if your site is completely innocent.

Don't use images instead of text links

Search engine optimization is all about text, and if you use images instead of text, even if you have good alt text, search engines will have a harder time ranking your site. This is especially true for navigation. Search engine spiders crawl through your site by following links, and links on images can be more difficult for them to follow or rank than text links. Using images instead of text makes your pages slower for your customers too. You're better off styling your text with CSS, than using images.

Photo Credits Pixabay

Don't make constant minor changes to content

While you want search engines to see that you update your content, making minor changes (like correcting spelling errors or changing 10 or 20 characters) implies that you're just trying to get the updated date changed. This looks like you're trying to fool the search engines into thinking that you update your pages more than you actually do. Do spend time updating your pages, but make the updates substantive.

Don't duplicate content on your site

One trick that spammers like to use is to create one page and then post it in numerous locations, both on one domain and on others. The idea is that if there are enough copies of the page, it will get seen by more people. But search engines don't like duplicate content as it's a waste of space on their servers and does not provide good information to their customers. If a search engine suspects your site is spamming them with multiple copies, your site could be banned.

Don't write Flash-only sites

If you're going to use Flash on your site, you must have an HTML version that displays when Flash is enabled. It can be tempting to put in just a single line or two of HTML as your non-Flash alternative; after all, you've done so much work on the Flash site. But since the search engines only see the HTML, that's what they'll rank, and you won't rank high with just a tiny version of your site in HTML. If you must use Flash as your site, and you want to rank well in search engines, you need to be prepared to write your site twice - once in Flash and once in HTML.

Photo Credits Pixabay Bing Search

Don't rely on AdSense to boost your rankings

AdSense is a way to earn money on your website. But contrary to popular believe, having AdSense ads won't improve your ranking in search engines, even Google. They won't hurt your rankings either. It's perfectly fine to use them, but don't expect them to improve your search rankings.

Don't omit alt text for images especially images inside the text

Images in line with your text can dress up your Web page, but if you leave off the alternative text (alt text) search engines won't pick up the content relevance. Also keep in mind that the heavier your page is with images, the less likely that search engines will rank it highly. Text is what gets ranked in most search engines, and alt text is a poor alternative.

Don't create pages of links

Pages of links are boring both for your customers and for search engines. Most search engines value links that are in context and appear related to the page as a whole. Note, however, that many social networking sites (like Digg and del.icio.us) tend to favor pages that are lists of links, so sometimes it can be advantageous to write them anyway, just don't expect them to rank high in search engines.

Don't rely on links from domains on the same IP

While Google doesn't discriminate against domains that have the same IP (for example, domains that use virtual hosts), other search engines may. So it's best to avoid trying to increase your inbound links with links from other domains that you own. The same is true for domains hosted on the same hosting provider (coming from the same C-level IP address). Google doesn't penalize sites like this, but other engines might. This is another situation where if it becomes apparent that you're doing it, you could get all your sites banned from search engines.

Photo Credits Pixabay - Yahoo Search

Never include invisible text on your pages

Hiding text by making it the same color as the background color may fool your customers, but it won't fool search engines. Another variation of this is where you make the font size so small that it's unreadable by the naked eye. Don't hide text - your site will be banned. Search engines understand CSS and font and background colors. They also recognize that a font-size of 1px is not going to be readable. Text that is hidden from your readers but visible to search engines is considered spam and will get your site banned.

Never display different content to a spider than customers

This is often called cloaking because it is an effort to cloak what your site delivers in something that might be seen as more palatable to search engines. It can be very tempting to use cloaking, but while it might give you better results at first, search engines don't like it. Don't cloak websites - your site will be banned. Search engines want to provide a resource of information that is real, not something that has been doctored to give artificial results. When they discover that your site is cloaking, it will be removed from the search directory.

Keep your keywords together

Search engines rank keywords in pages regardless of where they are found. But if you're trying to rank well for a specific keyword phrase, keeping the keywords together will insure that the search engines recognize that they are related.

Don't link a lot to external sites

Linking to sites not on your site is a good idea, but don't fill up your pages with them. At best, you will dilute the effectiveness of your page in the search engines, and at worst your page will look like a list of links and get slightly penalized by search engines. Also, when you have lots of external links, you have more to check on a regular basis, to make sure that those pages don't go bad or turn into "bad neighborhoods".

Use 302 redirects only for long or ugly URLs

HTTP 302 redirects are for temporary redirects. The only time you should use them is for redirecting ugly URLs to more user-friendly ones. This tells the search engine that the ugly URL should not be removed from the index, because the user-friendly URL is just to make the URL palatable. Keep in mind that many spammers use 302 redirects to fool search engines. So be judicious in your use of them.

Put your keyword phrase in alternative text

Images are a great place to put your keyword phrase - in the alternate text. This is a way to add your keyword phrase into your document without being repetitive to your readers. But be careful not to overdo it - as you don't want to appear to be keyword stuffing. That could get your site banned.

Put your keyword phrase at the top of the HTML

More than just the first paragraph, you should try to move your content towards the top of the HTML document. And that includes your keyword phrase.

Link all major images

It's important to always link images because people click on images. And search engines value content that has been linked. The key is to always include alternative text, so that the search engine has text to rank. Any image that your customer can see on the page should be linked.

Choose a phrase that is popular, but not too popular

When trying to decide on a keyword phrase, you want to find one that is popular but not extremely popular. This may seem counter-intuitive, but the reality is that extremely popular keywords are very desirable and so very competitive. It's better to try to optimize for keywords that you can rank higher. You'll get more page views from a less popular keyword when you're on the first or second page of the search engines, than from a super popular keyword that you only make it to page 50 of search engines.

​References:

SEO Experts Group

Weebly Guidelines on SEO

Google, Bing and Yahoo SEO

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